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January is reporting season for many agencies and it can be a stressful time, especially when your reports just don’t look right. Our MAAC tech team works with many agencies to help them get their year-end reports ready to submit. Through these experiences we have learned a few things we would like to share with you and hopefully make your reporting season a little less stressful.

The best thing you can do to prevent a stressful reporting season is to spread your work out throughout the year. We recommend pulling your reports frequently to check your work and make sure your data entry is up to date and accurate. This is especially true for agencies that have extremely high volumes of service entries which increases the risk of data entry errors. Pulling the reports frequently to check your work will make reporting season a much less stressful time.

One of the easiest ways to check your work in MAACLink is to pull a Service Summary. This report won’t give you a lot of details on each service entry; however, it will give you a summary of all the services provided. If you are an agency that only provides food pantry services but your Service Summary shows you provided budget coaching to one of your clients, that may be a sign you need to check that data entry.

Sometimes it was just the wrong click that resulted in this error, but it will throw off your reporting. Waiting until the end of the year to fix all these small errors will make for a big mess, so fixing them at the end of each month, or even weekly, will make for a much less stressful reporting season.

Most of the MAACLink reports also allow you to filter by user, which can also be helpful in checking your personal data entry in MAACLink.

Clicking on your name when pulling a report can allow you to report on the data entry completed under your username. This tool can be especially helpful if you work or volunteer for a large agency. Clicking on your username will bring back information on only the service entries you completed so you can go back and check your work for accuracy.

Finally, my best tip for making reporting season less stressful is… call us! Always remember we are here as a resource for you and we would love to help you check your work. If you are pulling your reports and struggling to figure out why the numbers don’t look right, just give us a call (816) 561-2727.

Some agencies using our social service software provide services to clients en masse without capturing all of the universal data elements, including name, social security number, date of birth, and much more, that would be required to create a client profile in MAACLink. These services could be meals (as in a soup kitchen), support group meetings, health screenings, or many other types of services.

MAACLink provides a way to track these services; it’s under the Home tab (orange arrow in the screenshot below) on the Indirect Services (yellow arrow) screen. This screen displays an agency’s most recent indirect services in reverse chronological order, and can be navigated with the pagination links at the bottom of the list (purple arrow).

To create an indirect service, first click the Add Services button (green arrow) at the bottom of the Indirect Services screen.

Indirect Services screenshot 1

Complete the setup screen with the date the service was provided, the provider agency, the fund the service was provided through, the type of service, the units provided (usually the number of clients served), and the value per unit, if desired (if a value is entered, MAACLink will calculate the total value of the indirect service. Value is an optional data field). Then click the Save button (pink arrow in the screenshot below).

Indirect Services screenshot 2

The new service will appear at the top of the list on the Indirect Services screen.

Services added under Indirect Services will show up on one report, the Service Summary report. Indirect services do not appear on other reports because they are not connected to client profiles.